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Lead Faculty, Master of Applied Data Science

dnszafir@unc.edu | Danielle Szafir‘s Website

Research Areas:

Visualization, data analytics, computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality


Danielle Albers Szafir serves as lead faculty in the master of applied data science program. She is also an assistant professor of computer science at the UNC-Chapel Hill. Prior to joining the department, she was an assistant professor of computer science, an affiliate professor of information science and aerospace engineering, and a fellow in the ATLAS Institute and Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research, which sits at the intersection of information visualization, data science and cognitive science, has been integrated into leading tools such as D3 and Tableau and received best paper awards at IEEE VIS, IEEE VR, ACM CHI, and IS&T CIC. She was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30: Science list in 2018 and received the NSF CAREER Award in 2021. Her work is funded by the NSF, US Air Force, J.P. Morgan Chase, U.S. Space Force, and DHHS. She received a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of Washington as a NASA Space Grant scholar and a doctorate in computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.